Seafood With a Surprise

It figures that a restaurant named CBS Seafood would have tanks of live fish and serve everything from geoduck to shrimp. However, you just might go there for something else--dim sum.

The tables fill rapidly at midday for the parade of dumplings, sweets, soups and barbecued meats. In the weeks that I have watched the dim sum carts roll by, their offerings haven’t changed, but the selection is large enough to put CBS in the upper rank of Chinatown’s dim sum places.

There is plenty of seafood dim sum, some of it spectacular. Golden brown dumplings as big as baseballs are stuffed with crab encased in seafood paste. Bean curd skin wraps huge bundles of shrimp combined with bits of greenery. Smaller scallop and crabmeat dumplings, crunchy with water chestnut and carrot, are also wrapped with bean curd.

Fried shrimp may be heaped on plates, stretched on skewers or minced and wrapped around lengths of sugar cane. The wonderful pan-fried dumplings stuffed with shrimp and spinach must be delicate, because the plate is always covered with plastic wrap.

Steamed shrimp dumplings (har gow) and shrimp wrapped in slippery soft “crepes” of fresh rice flour dough pass by, along with bell peppers filled with shrimp, pork-stuffed shui mai, wonton soup (big wontons, generously packed with meat), taro dumplings, turnip cakes and glistening glazed barbecued pork buns.

The cheapest dim sum is har gow at $1.70, but seafood dishes can go a lot higher. With fresh lobster at $14 a pound, a lobster hot pot comes to more than $30. And there isn’t much meat once the shell is removed.

A more interesting dish, and at $9.95 a better buy, is thin-cut veal chops with eggplant in black pepper sauce. It’s the only hot pot flagged as spicy, but I’d call it mild. So is the “spicy” eggplant with minced pork, a handsome dish of fried eggplant slices gleaming with sweet brown sauce.

As you can tell, there’s more than dim sum here. A sheet pasted inside the menu lists specials, which, like the dim sum, don’t seem to change, but being listed doesn’t necessarily mean available. Once all eggplant dishes were scratched because the vegetable hadn’t been delivered. (The “spicy” eggplant with pork is one of the few non-seafood specials.)

The light Cantonese touch is evident in sauteed rock cod fillet, seasoned with only a clear broth sauce and a few shreds of ginger, carrot and mushroom. Shrimp, scallops and squid come in a faintly sweet brown sauce subtly flavored with garlic. Sizzling scallops and black pepper on a bed of green peppers don’t actually sizzle when you get them because they’re drenched in sauce, although the scallops might sizzle in the kitchen, because they’re rather dry.

Soft, gelatinous and elusively briny, sea cucumber isn’t for everyone. Here, it comes with fat shiitake mushrooms on a bed of spinach or, for serious devotees, combined with duck’s feet or simply with brown sauce. At the opposite end of the texture scale is sauteed conch. The thin, ruffly white slices, delicately seasoned and combined with peapods, mushrooms and yellow leek, are firm and chewy.

Braised pork with preserved vegetable is pork belly braised with soy sauce, star anise and sugar; the low-rise chunk of meat is lined with a layer of belly fat, making it look like a terrine. Regular customers appreciate the fat, but you can pull it away and concentrate on the meat, which is aromatic and baby-food tender. The preserved vegetable, tart like sauerkraut, cuts the richness.

Although CBS Seafood isn’t in the main part of Chinatown, it’s clearly been discovered anyway, because it’s always busy. If you’re familiar with Philippe the Original, the venerable French dip sandwich spot, you can find CBS by walking to the west end of the same block and turning the corner. The first door opens into the restaurant, the second into a deli where you can buy hot food from a steam table and the same dim sum that circulates on the carts.

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CBS Seafood Restaurant, 700 N. Spring St., Los Angeles. (213) 617-2323. Open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily; dim sum served from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wine and beer. Parking lot. Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Dim sum, $1.70 to $9 apiece; dinner for two, $15 to $56.

What to get: Shrimp, scallops and squid in garlic sauce, sauteed rock cod fillet, sauteed conch, braised pork with preserved vegetable, veal chop with eggplant in black pepper sauce, spicy eggplant with minced pork.